Saturday, August 02, 2014

I am not suggesting that Brennan is blackmailing Obama, or even that he would necessarily retaliate if fired. Still, if Obama is like most people in positions of power, he fires no subordinate without first asking himself, "Could this person damage me?" If Obama is a normal person, rather than an unusually principled person, the answer factors into his decision. Look at what Brennan said in March, immediately after denying that the CIA spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee, when Andrea Mitchell asked if he'd resign his post if that turned out to be wrong:

... if I did something wrong, I will go to the president, and I will explain to him exactly what I did, and what the findings were. And he is the one who can ask me to stay or to go.

He's a smart man.

That's a pretty shocking little bit of speculation there. And if it weren't for the long history of presidents kowtowing to the holders of the secrets it might be a foolish one. But the fact is that these people who operate in the dark have all kinds of information about everybody including (epecially) politicians who have power over them.

By the way, Friedersdorf doesn't speculate that it's something personal or private. Brennan knows where the drone bodies are buried and he speculates that an angry, fired Brennan could write a very nasty book about the president's involvement in that practice if he chose to spin things in a certain way ...